The New Polish Writers
CHASE, RICHARD
WRITERS and WRITING The New Polish Writers The Broken Mirror. Ed. by Pawel Mayewski. Random Bouse. 209 pp. $3.50. Reviewed by Richard Chase Author, "The American Novel and Its...
...But after the Great Despondency came the Thaw, and the new freedom is greeted by the Polish writers with energy and gratitude...
...This period of disillusionment produced such reconsiderations of Marxist theory as Leszek Kolakowski's "Permanent and Transitory Aspects of Marxism" and Jan Strzelecki's remarkable "Notes: 1950-1953...
...Strzelecki reflects on some of the dubious psychological implications of Marxism, and Kolakowski concludes that nothing is permanent in Marxism except those aspects that can meet the universal tests of scientific method and thus be absorbed into the general stream of modern thought...
...But despite apparent heresy all these writers, even in their disillusion, remained and still remain Communists...
...For a time after the war, the repressive force of the Stalinist hegemony in culture was not yet fully felt, and the young intellectuals set out in high hopes of creating a genuinely revolutionary national culture, taking earlier poets such as Mayakovsky for their ideal...
...That I did not know...
...My profound conviction of the justness of Marxism had not been shaken...
...My struggle against bitterness, chaos, and despondency had become almost hopeless...
...All of these writings, which include essays, notes, reminiscences, stories and a play, were originally published in 1956 and 1957, and they all vigorously respond to the atmosphere of relative freedom of expression that by then had set in...
...Lionel Trilling reminds us in his introduction that, so far as we can see, it is really Russia which will in large measure determine Poland's cultural and artistic development...
...It never occurred to me to solve my dilemma by going over to the enemy camp, by betraying the ideals of the Revolution...
...Gradually the group comes under the control of the faceless bureaucrats and is forced to produce dull plays like "Shock Brigade," whose subject is Communist heroics in a coal mine...
...But neither from conviction nor from fear or despair could I have chosen the capitalist world...
...In a situation which at its best cannot be described as favorable to greatness, these writers nevertheless practice the virtues of great literature—its depth of feeling, its intelligence, its energy, its irony, its humor, its human protestation...
...Woroszylski's words are typical: "I kept asking myself: Who am I? What cause do I serve...
...though I did recall individual oases, among them writers who, I realized now, may have been impelled to take the first step on the road to apostasy by experiences like mine...
...But whatever happens to the Polish writers, one cannot help thinking better of the possibilities of modern man after reading this important book...
...Now, they all say in one way or another, it is possible to reaffirm one's faith in the future of socialist culture in Poland...
...The House of the Dead is Hertz's name for the Writers Union, with its cultural overseers—"the gloomy sectarians, the dull schematists, the blind eulogists of reality, the muzzlers of the literature of the decade," as Woroszylski calls them...
...What was wanted by the anonymous officials was not plays and poems like those of Mayakovsky but works of "socialist realism," like "On the Construction Site," "The Tractors Will Conquer the Spring," and "Coal...
...WRITERS and WRITING The New Polish Writers The Broken Mirror...
...The moral deterioration of the theater group, affecting their most intimate lives, is what interests Brandys most...
...Most of the authors are young...
...Its fatal flaw lay somewhere in its practice, but what was it and where...
...Most of the Polish writers testify to the disillusion, frustration, boredom and despair which followed their enthusiasm in the era of enforced conformity that shortly ensued...
...Now it is possible to assert, in the words of Pawel Hertz, "that one of the conditions of social development is complete freedom for artists and scientists, and that the condition of cultural and artistic development is the constant, independent national existence of a given society...
...MAYWESKI has assembled in this book an exciting and instructive collection of writings by contemporary Polish writers...
...This is no doubt true (while I was writing this review, the New York Times reported a massive attack on the Polish writers in the official organ of the Soviet Writers Union...
...All have been intensely and personally concerned with the building of a new, socialist Poland after the war...
...Reviewed by Richard Chase Author, "The American Novel and Its Tradition," "The Democratic Vista" MR...
...All are apparently convinced Communists...
...The typical experience of these writers is well summed up by Wiktor Woroszylski in his "Notes for a Biography" and by Pawel Hertz in his "Recollections from the House of the Dead...
...What is this world I am building and singing about...
...Many of the authors represented in The Broken Mirror ceased to write, or at least to publish, between 1948 and 1953, an era characterized by Woroszylski as "The Great Despondency...
...Kazimierz Brandys's "The Defense of Granada" is a bitterly humorous story about a group of advanced intellectuals who launch a theater devoted to revolutionary drama...
...Yet all are heretical when judged by Stalinist principles...
Vol. 41 • September 1958 • No. 33
